Friday afternoon page: please call to discuss stress test- moderate ischemia. The page was regarding a patient in a study I was conducting on RA and cardiovascular disease. Determining how to better identify and manage RA patients at elevated CV risk was one of the driving reasons that led my colleagues and I to establish an interdisciplinary clinic between cardiology and rheumatology over a decade ago.

This week, Dr. Jack Cush reviews the news with special guest, Dr. Janet Pope. They discuss "Not-non-Inferior", large scale genetic screening, Zoster risk w/ newer lupus drugs, tapering, RA referral problems and the TNR webinar session on "ORAL Surveillance Revisited".

Early diagnosis of inflammatory arthritis (IA) is rooted in patient (self or MD) referrals. A recent analysis shows only a minority of rheumatology referrals had inflammatory arthritis, with only 21% were seen within the first 6 weeks of symptoms. 

Multimorbidity is a little bit different than comorbidity, which may be a term that you're more familiar with. In comorbidity, we put rheumatoid arthritis as our focus, whereas in multimorbidity, we put the patient at the center of our focus.

Imagine that 100 years from now, your great granddaughter, an eminent rheumatologist, reviews the history of rheumatoid arthritis mimics.

The safety of tofacitinib and TNF inhibitors was studied in high risk rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients in the ORAL Surveillance study, which culminated in an FDA warning in January 2021 on the cardiovascular, cancer and VTE risks associated with JAK inhibitor use.

A large cohort study has shown that rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients are at an increased risk of developing aortic stenosis (AS), undergoing aortic valve intervention, or AS-related death.